SBIFF Day Ten Report: Amanda Seyfried Is Citizen Marion; Plus Nordic and Saturday Films

In a career spanning 20-plus years despite her mere 35 years on the planet, Amanda Seyfried has been a fascinating bunch of people. She was an adolescent snark attack in her breakout film Mean Girls, a gleaming chanteuse in Mamma Mia, made erotic turns in Shame and Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, and, for her first role playing a real person, played reluctant porn star Linda Lovelace in Lovelace. She also grabbed the screen despite her small part in Paul Schrader’s masterful, Ethan Hawke-starring tortured Christian pastor in First Reformed, in 2017 (my vote for that year’s greatest film).

But the persona central to Seyfried’s life at present — the present being the moment she is up for a supporting actress Oscar for her dazzling turn in the David Fincher-directed Mank — is Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s lover and a misunderstood singer-actress, made famous in fictional form in Orson Welles’ (or was it half Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz?) Citizen Kane. Seyfried’s Marion, played in sympathetic cahoots with Gary Oldman’s “Mank,” is a standout in a film both proudly anachronistic (as Fincher keeps reminding us) and historical revisionist.

Seyfried seemed a more-than apt candidate for a tribute evening at SBIFF this year, and she got one — via Zoom from her upstate New York family’s farm, that is — in the form of Friday night’s “Montecito Award” presentation.